Which yet-to-be-released movie are you excited to see?
The new Indiana Jones flick. It had better not suck.
What role did you play in your school play?
Even though I was active in my high school's drama club and competed in acting events at speech & debate tournaments, I appeared in only one high school theatrical production. It was a non-speaking tourist role at the beginning of Guys & Dolls. Exciting, huh?
Pax tagged me. Here are the rules:
- Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
- People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
- At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
- Don’t forget to leave them a comment on their blog and tell them they’ve been tagged, and to come back and read your blog for the whole story.
So. I must now think of eight at least marginally interesting things to share about myself.
1. I met Pax, whom I love madly, online. This was in the old days, long before the Internet as we know it. We were members of a local electronic BBS called Th' Ogre. He had a C-64 with a 300-baud modem, and I was stylin' with a 20-pound laptop with a 20MB hard drive and a 2400-baud modem. If you have to ask what a baud rate is, you are too young to matter.
2. I attended two different high schools, and my school mascots were owls (Marshall, Missouri) and kewpies (Hickman High, Columbia, Missouri).
3. I like sweet wines. Bring on the Pink Catawba!!
4. I am a PT Cruiser fanatic. My Ténèbre is a 2005 in midnight blue, and after 46,000+ miles together, she's still a fun little car.
5. I was well into adulthood before I could eat tapioca pudding because when I was a child, my brother told me that the tapioca beads were weevil eggs. I believed him. I didn't even know what a weevil was, but it sure sounded bad.
6. I have visited the following foreign countries: Canada, France, England, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Mexico.
7. As long as spiders exist, I cannot believe in a benevolent God. Malevolent, perhaps.
8. "Eight, eight, I forget what eight was for!"
I am probably tagging people who have already been tagged, but what the hell: Patricia Volonakis Davis, Megan, Majicke, Manon-It-All, snoringKatZ, Emjay, Flamingo Dancer, and andria.
Iron Man took the top spot at the box office this past weekend with 104.2 million dollars in ticket sales. Did you see the flick? What did you think? (Or, if you didn't see it - do you plan to?)
I don't plan to see it. The Transformers were enough for me.
I want to be like water. I want to slip through fingers, but hold up a ship.
Not sure who is the author.
Pax & I watched Brick last night. This movie totally rocks! The dialogue and the cinematography are perfect renditions of classic noir -- but in a modern California high school setting. This made it thoroughly unrealistic, of course, but writer/director Rian Johnson was obviously going for a somewhat dreamlike quality. The high school campus is deserted except for the main characters, and the only parent on scene is the mother of a guy in his mid-twenties.
This film is simply brilliant. I don't want to say much more about it for fear of spoiling the whole surreal experience, but I do hope that Johnson keeps up the excellent work.
Kelly swiped this from somebody, and now I am swiping it from Kelly.
What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by Library Thing's users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
Anna Karenina (I may try this one again someday, perhaps with a newer translation. But I just wasn't caring about any of the characters.)
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude (It's still in Mt TBR, and I expect I'll try it again someday. It's just not a high priority for me.)
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose (This is in my Mt TBR.)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick (Melville sucks! I will never even attempt to read this book.)
Ulysses
Madame Bovary (It was okay, but it didn't really resonate with me.)
The Odyssey (Interesting, but not a huge favorite.)
Pride and Prejudice (Also on Mt TBR.)
Jane Eyre (An enjoyable read, but it's hard for me to see what all the huge fuss is about.)
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife (On my all-time Top 20 list.)
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin (I really liked this one.)
The Kite Runner (Very moving story, well told.)
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations (Part of Mt TBR.)
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged (On Mt TBR. I don't feel I can properly diss it until I've read it.)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (Though now I can't recall if we read the whole thing or just selected portions.)
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World (Very thought-provoking book.)
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein (Also in Mt TBR.)
The Count of Monte Cristo (I need to get a reading copy. I have a really cool copy, but it's ancient and far too fragile.)
Dracula (Way ahead of its time in many ways. Any fan of modern vampire stories should read this.)
A Clockwork Orange (Boring and pretentious. I don't plan to see the movie, either.)
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel (Another tome in Mt TBR.)
1984 (I was supposed to read this for freshman orientation at Drury. I thought it was deadly dull. They showed the film during orientation, and I thought it was boring as well.)
Angels & Demons (I read The Da Vinci Code first, so this one didn't really hold any surprises for me.)
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses (Also in Mt TBR.)
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Another one I do intend to finish.)
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (The library discussion group picked this one a while back. I had really liked the movie, but the novel didn't really appeal.)
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables (I'm having translation issues with both copies I have, so I've decided to try it again once I get my hands on an unabridged copy in the original French.)
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Just read this a few weeks ago and thought it was great.)
Dune (Yes, also in Mt TBR.)
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury (Another in Mt TBR.)
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon (Yes, I plan to finish this one. I got interrupted when it got packed during a move.)
Neverwhere (Yep, in Mt TBR.)
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five (Also in Mt TBR.)
The Scarlet Letter (Great book. I found a copy for my "keeper" shelf.)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel (Also in Mt TBR.)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita (I read one Nabakov book and found it tedious. I'd swear it was translated by Babelfish, but it pre-dates the Internet, and everybody tells me Nabakov wrote it in English to begin with. Anyway, I'm in no hurry to read more from him.)
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey (I decided to read Pride & Prejudice first.)
The Catcher in the Rye (Ugh. Boring prattle. Yes, I was a teenager when I read it. Still thought it sucked.)
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit (I read this when I was about 11 or 12. I really enjoyed it, and I do plan to read LotR someday.)
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island (Yet another in Mt TBR.)
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Oops. Um, spoiler alert. :-) When Pax & I were at Chuck & Michelle's house, Chuck loaned us their copy of Soylent Green, and we just watched it this evening.
